Customer relations management (“CRM”) plays an ever-increasing role in commerce. To be successful, a merchant (a term that is used herein to describe any entity that engages in a commercial relationship with a customer) must attempt to satisfy existing customers and attract new customers. Merchants employ a wide variety of strategies to accomplish these goals, and many place a strong focus on direct, individualized communication with customers (who might be existing customers, new customers, or even potential customers).
As technology has advanced, some merchants have attempted to take advantage of these advancements, using systems such as interactive voice response (“IVR”) systems to manage telephone communications with customers, electronic mail (“email”) communications to reach potential customers or solidify relationships with new or existing customers, and web-based communications to provide marketing information, sales channels, and post-sale support. These modes of communications are but a few examples, but they all share a common characteristic: they employ technology to automate the process of customer communications, and in so doing, provide the merchant with enhanced efficiency.
In many cases, however, this enhanced efficiency comes at a price: customer satisfaction. Across many industries, customers have voiced dissatisfaction with their interactions with merchant technology. For example, email spam has become a frustration for many consumers. Likewise, customers attempting to navigate complex web sites or arcane IVR decision trees often experience enough frustration to negatively affect their impression of the merchant itself. This situation is problematic from the perspective of either the merchant or the customer.
This problem becomes particularly acute in the case of a customer who is dissatisfied with a product and seeks redress from the merchant. Already frustrated, the customer is likely to become even more hostile to the merchant if forced to endure an exasperating interaction with a merchant web site or IVR system. In many cases, this hostility can result in the loss of the customer. Research has been done in an attempt to make such interactions less frustrating for the consumer (and therefore less likely to result in the loss of that customer to the merchant), but the efficacy of such strategies is largely unknown.
Conversely, while the merchant does not want to provoke hostility in the customer, the merchant often would like to save the sale, if possible, or obtain some other outcome more favorable than the customer merely returning the product for a full refund, which, depending on the nature of the product, could result in a complete loss for the merchant (e.g., if the product is a consumable) and/or the loss of the return shipping costs. Thus, in many cases, a merchant would prefer to be able to reach some sort of compromise solution with the customer, leaving the customer at least relatively happy but also producing an outcome that is optimal for the merchant, under the circumstances.
To date, however, merchants have not had the tools to identify communication strategies that maximize the probability of obtaining such an optimal outcome. In fact, many merchants even have difficulty in identifying what such an optimal outcome would be, under a given set of circumstances.
Thus, there is a need for tools and techniques that would provide a merchant with insight into customer communication strategies that maximize the probability of an optimal outcome from the interaction with the customer, whether the customer is an existing customer, a new customer, or a potential customer. It would be beneficial if such tools and techniques could be applied across a variety of communication modes, such as human-to-human interactions, IVR interactions, web interactions, and/or the like.